About 65 percent of U.S. adults plan to buy technology gifts this season, said Consumer Technology Association Senior Director-Research Shawn DuBravac at the annual holiday sales and year-end analysis during CES Unveiled in New York Tuesday. CTA expects tech holiday spending to rise 2.3 percent in 2015 to $34.21 billion, DuBravac told us. That's slightly off last year’s 2.5 percent growth rate. Within the electronics retail segment, online sales are expected to grow 14 percent this holiday season, compared with 16 percent last year, while mobile sales will see the biggest growth rise, from 25 percent last year to 35 percent this year, said DuBravac. Fifty-seven percent of respondents planned to use mobile devices for research, and CTA estimates mobile sales will be 18 percent of online sales. Mature categories generating more than half of the annual shipment volume in consumer electronics in 2015 include smartphones ($54 billion), tablets ($22.6 billion), laptops ($17.8 billion) and desktop PCs ($6 billion), said DuBravac. He said the association expects emerging categories like drones, smart home devices and smartwatches to become a bigger part of holiday sales in coming years.

Contenders for the GOP presidential nomination would dismantle parts of the federal government relevant to telecom if elected, they said Tuesday during a Fox Business Network debate. “On the regulatory side I think we need to repeal every rule that Barack Obama has in terms of work in progress, every one of them,” said Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor. “And start over. For those that are already in existence, the regulation of the Internet, we have to start over, but we ought to do that.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a member of the Commerce Committee, touted his plan to ax many parts of the government. “Today we rolled out a spending plan,” Cruz said during the debate. He outlined “$500 billion in specific cuts -- five major agencies that I would eliminate.” He would kill the Department of Commerce and the CPB, the latter of which he said should be privatized. “For decades, the Commerce Department has funded useless projects,” the Cruz campaign website said in one explanation of the plan. “That said, there are several functions that should be retained through other departments or agencies, including the functions of the … U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the National Institute of Standards and Technology” and NTIA. Cruz also promised to aggressively pursue a smaller federal government: “A Cruz Administration will institute a freeze on the hiring of new federal civilian employees across the executive branch,” he said on his campaign website. “For those agencies in which it is determined that a vacant position needs to be filled, I will authorize the hiring of a maximum ratio of one person for every three who leave.”

The FCC Wireline Bureau is seeking comment on AT&T's waiver petition for an extra three months to file its Q3 rural call completion report due to system difficulties it encountered (see 1511020060). Initial comments are due Nov. 17, replies Nov. 25, a public notice said.

AT&T and the International Intellectual Property Alliance praised Trans-Pacific Partnership language, in separate statements Friday. The Obama administration released major portions of TPP’s full text Thursday (see 1511050058). TPP “brings higher standards and protections to countries that represent nearly 40 percent of the global economy,” AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi said in a statement Friday. “It will open markets, and establish rules of the road for a 21st Century digital economy. The e-Commerce commitments in TPP also provide a benchmark for reference in future trade agreements.” AT&T hopes for ratification soon, Cicconi said. IIPA said it still needs to review TPP’s full text but said IP language in the treaty “is built on the recognition that the creative sector makes an enormous contribution to the U.S. economy, jobs, and global competitiveness, and that further opening the markets of our major trading partners in this sector must be a top national priority.” The treaty's IP section “also contains important provisions aimed at expanding digital trade in creative materials, an increasingly critical sector where U.S. creators face both serious challenges and exciting opportunities in reaching new markets around the world,” IIPA said.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board plans a closed meeting Monday in Washington starting at 9:30 a.m. to continue PCLOB's in-depth and ongoing examination (see 1504080024) of specific counterterrorism activities related to executive order 12333, it said Thursday. President Ronald Reagan issued the EO in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations. EO 12333 essentially establishes the overall framework for U.S. intelligence activities, including when and how agencies can spy on people within the U.S., and provides policies on what data can be collected, kept and shared. PCLOB began the examination in April and a report may be released by the end of 2015.

The Visiting Nurse Service of New York signed a five-year agreement with Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the telco said in a news release Wednesday. The healthcare provider will outsource its IT network and wireless infrastructure to enable its point-of-care communications, said the company. Verizon said its services will give the Visiting Nurse Service a "more efficient way to manage communications between clinicians, employees and patients especially in the patient-care setting."

Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig, a strong net neutrality advocate and observer of Internet policy, on Monday ended his ambitions to compete against other Democratic contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination. He blamed Democrats for changing the rules and instituting provisions that wouldn't allow him any chance to compete in the second Democratic primary debate against such candidates as Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “I must today end my campaign for the Democratic nomination and turn to the question of how best to continue to press for this reform now,” Lessig said in a video, referring to his focus on campaign finance overhaul. Lessig announced his interest in the nomination in August (see 1508110050). He didn't rule out the possibility of running as an independent.

AT&T asked the FCC for an extra three months to file a rural call completion report for the third quarter. In a petition filed on Monday in docket 13-39, AT&T asked for a three-month waiver from a November 2013 rural call completion rule requiring "covered providers" to file quarterly reports on their compliance with duties to "record and retain specified information" on every long-distance toll-call attempt. Noting the commission allowed for a conduct "safe harbor" and waiver process to guard against undue regulatory burdens, AT&T said it was granted a previous six-month waiver Feb. 2 so it could implement a plan to "retain and report data based on a statistically valid sample of inter- and intrastate calls to rural and nonrural areas," which required "extensive system changes." But AT&T said "due to unexpected difficulties, that timeframe has proved to be insufficient to test and validate" its rural call completion data, so it needed another three months to complete its implementation work and file a quarterly report.

The FCC proposed to change hearing aid compatibility (HAC) rules for both wireline and wireless handsets. The commission in an NPRM released Friday proposed in the wireline arena to: (1) adopt an industry standard developed by the Telecommunications Industry Association that "appears likely" to help people with hearing loss select phones “with sufficient volume control to meet their communication needs and provide greater regulatory certainty for the industry”; and (2) apply the agency’s phone volume control and other HAC requirements “to handsets used for VoIP services, pursuant to the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA).” For wireless, the FCC sought comment on a proposal to set a standard for handset volume control “to ensure more effective acoustic coupling between handsets and hearing aids or cochlear implants.” The commission also proposed to require manufacturers to use exclusively a 2011 wireless standard developed by an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) committee “to certify future handsets as hearing aid compatible; and eliminate the power-down exception if manufacturers are required to test and rate handsets exclusively" under that standard. Finally, to implement a CVAA provision and simplify the process for achieving handset compliance with HAC requirements, the FCC sought comment “on a process for enabling industry to use new or revised technical standards for assessing hearing aid compatibility compliance, prior to Commission approval of such standards.” Commissioner Mike O’Rielly said he supported most of the notice but partially dissented due to concerns that FCC proposals to implement CVAA Section 701(c) on standard setting and HAC compliance “may lead to an overly expansive interpretation of the statute,” permit “inappropriate Commission intervention in the standards process” and allow “excessive delegation to Commission staff.”

While the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees with the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision to deny a motion for a preliminary injunction (see 1510290070), the group said all Americans should celebrate that bulk collection of call records ends in a few weeks. The injunction would have barred the government from collecting call records under the phone metadata program, required it to quarantine call records already collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and prohibited it from querying metadata obtained through the program using any phone number or other identifier associated with them. It’s now “up to the district court to address to what extent the government must purge the call records it collected unlawfully,” ACLU attorney Alex Abdo, who argued the case, said in an emailed statement to us. “In the meantime, the government still needs to rein in other overreaching NSA spying programs," he said.